


like dust in the air

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, I'm Sorry, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-02 02:43:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Clint should have known better than to think this was the end.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'M SORRY! My friend Alex tells me that I'm an evil person for writing this, but it had to be done - my form of catharsis, I reckon. If you don't want to be spoiled for Infinity War DO NOT READ because it takes place right after, and therefore is obviously compliant.

**~A tear is traveling across some skin**  
**Molecules of water in sodium spin**  
**Atoms are shaking so infinitely small**  
**Just lights in the darkness, no reason at all ~**

**Will Varley, The Man Who Fell to Earth**

  
He’s washing up. The soap suds are piling high against his forearms, mountains and valleys of rainbow-glinting white and the chink of half-clean crockery. He can hear Nate babbling at Laura through in the sitting room, and upstairs, Lila is shrieking something inaudible at Coop. He smiles to himself at their noise, at their normality, at how quickly things have found an equilibrium. Alien ships are still dropping out of nothing into the streets of New York, and tomorrow the sun will rise and Laura will smile - hazy with sleep - across the pillow at him, rolling into his arms for a hug, and life will tick over into another day.

“I’m too old,” he’d told Steve, standing by that lake in Wakanda, the light reflecting in sheets off the mirrored surface. “Forty seven, three kids. I don’t want them growing up fatherless the way I had to.”

Steve had just given him one of those thousand-year-old smiles, and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Okay.”

“Dad!” Lila screams. “Cooper won’t give my ball back!”

“Cooper, be nice to your sister,” he calls back, hearing his son’s whine of protest, and footsteps, skittering down the stairs. The sun disappears below the horizon in a last blaze of faded orange glory. He pulls the plug in the sink, wipes his arms down, and turns around to see Lila in the doorway, red faced and tearful, and Cooper hovering on the steps behind her. He holds out his arms for a hug, and Lila runs into them. Cooper takes another step down the stairs and then, with no warning, his arm begins to disintegrate, the edges of his skin dissolving away into the air.  
There’s a moment of silence - Clint blinks, and then Cooper starts to scream, and Laura’s in the doorway. Time skips forward - they’re both on their knees in front of their son, helpless as his body crumbles into grey flakes, reaching out for him but it’s over in seconds, his remains sliding through their fingers. Clint turns to Laura, the shock turning the air in his lungs to fire, but she’s dissolving too, her fingers are turning grey and breaking into tiny little pieces, and she’s staring at him, helpless and pleading and then her mouth forms the words “I love you,” and she’s gone, just like Cooper, and he’s kneeling there staring at the space where his wife and son were just seconds ago. Something in the air has shifted, an energy signature has changed; he feels it sear against his skin, and he can’t think, god, think, brain, think, but then he can’t because Lila has tumbled forward into his arms and she’s crying and burying her face in his neck, clinging to him with all the strength in her eight-year-old arms, and he’s holding onto her, willing her not to go, not her too, not her and not Nate…

“Nate,” he whispers, and then he’s on his feet, Lila a limpet around his neck. In the sitting room, Nate is sitting on the floor, chubby cheeks and wide brown eyes and his little sweater with an archer on it, his fingers in his mouth.

“Dadada,” he says, and then bursts into tears.

“Hey little man, hey.” Clint feels all the strength in his legs rush away, and he lowers himself carefully to the floor, reaching out for Nate and pulling him close. Lila’s sobs have tapered off. The air is close and static, sparking against them, and he holds his children tight, feeling a snarl rising in his throat. Not them, he thinks, desperately. Please, anything but them too.

There is an awful moment where he thinks the universe has stopped listening, but time breathes out, long and slow, and somewhere deep down, he knows it is over.

[another thing Clint knows: the world began to change when the sky tore open and monsters poured down into New York. But that was just the overture. This, right here, sitting with his kids in his lap and his wife and eldest son a sheen of ash on the kitchen floor, this is the curtain call. Take a fucking bow.]

*

Hours later, when both Lila and Nate have sobbed themselves to sleep, he finds the strength from somewhere deep down to lever himself to his feet. He tucks Lila into the sofa, and Nate into her arms like a teddy bear, draping a blanket softly over the both of them, and tip-toeing into the kitchen to get his phone. He doesn’t look at the place where Laura and Cooper disappeared, just finds the phone and heads back to stand in the living room doorway, unlocking it with shaking hands. There’s still signal, and he blesses Stark; the world might be ending, but Stark technology still operates. There are nine missed calls from a burner phone number, and he rings it back, holding the phone to his ear. His hands are shaking from the force of trying to hold back his grief - he wants to howl, he wants to scream, to rip into the earth to find them, to take his bow and hunt down whoever did this (one thing he’s learned; there is always someone responsible), but he’s here and he has Lila and Nate, and this is it, there’s no-one else.

Natasha picks up on the second ring. “Clint?”

“Yeah,” he says

“Thank God, I was so worried.” Her voice is fierce. “Are you okay?”

“What’s happened?”

“Thanos,” she says, raw, like an open wound. He can feel the scratch of her words through the miles. “He won, Clint. He got all the infinity stones. There’s barely anyone left.”

“Who?”

“Steve, me, Bruce. Thor. Rhodey. Shuri and Okoye are here too. We have no idea where Tony is. Thanos disappeared, no idea where, but he’s gotten what he wanted.”

Clint feels every name missing off that list like a punch to the gut. So many good people, gone, just like Laura and Cooper; it’s not even a fair fight, he thinks, some alien bastard with unlimited power and he just wiped them all out with no warning, no… He almost misses what Natasha says next, catches himself at the last moment.

“Is everyone alright on your end?”

He doesn’t reply, he suddenly can’t get the words out. His eyes stick on Lila’s bronze-gold hair, frizzing out from under the blanket, and he can’t breathe.

“Clint? Clint, answer me, is everyone alright?”

“Laura,” he chokes out eventually, forcing his mouth to form the shape of her name. “Laura’s gone. And Cooper. I think our guard might have gone too, she hasn’t come to check in. It’s just me and Lila and Nate left.”

Something in his chest cracks open, rending his lungs and his heart wide, and the tears start, uncontrollable, and he can hear Natasha on the other end of the phone, saying things he can’t hear through the pound of the grief against his skull. Over on the couch, Lila shifts, and then sits up, rubbing her eyes.

“Daddy?” she asks in a tiny voice, and Clint holds out an arm for her, putting the phone on speaker on the floor. She pads across the room trailing the blanket and tucks herself into his arms, and he holds her close whilst he cries. Nate mumbles in his sleep on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Lila,” he manages.

“Lila?” he hears Natasha say on the other end of the phone.

“Auntie Nat?” Lila asks. “What’s wrong with Daddy? Where’s Mommy?”

“Something really bad has happened,” Natasha’s voice is soothing. Clint wants to yell at her to shut up, to stop making it worse - his daughter is eight, she doesn’t need to know this, let her be innocent for a little while longer - but his eight-year-old daughter has just seen her mother and brother dissolve before her eyes, and he knows innocence is something that’s dead and gone and will never come back. Anyway, Natasha’s never believed in pulling her punches, even with the kids. “We’re going to try and fix it, me and some of the others, but you’re going to have to stay strong. Look after Daddy for me.”

“I’m coming to Wakanda,” Clint grinds out.

“You’re staying where you are,” Natasha says.

“No, Natasha, I can’t. Please. Please.”

The quiet reaches out with begging hands. Lila’s little body is warm against his chest.

“I’ll tell Shuri you’re coming,” Natasha tells him eventually. The phone beeps, and then she’s gone. Lila looks at him with large, hopeful eyes, and says:

“It’s going to be okay. You’ll bring Mommy back, won’t you, Daddy?”

Clint wipes the tears roughly from his cheeks, brushes a thumb against his daughter’s cheek. The lie digs its claws into his throat. “I’ll try,” he tells her. “I’ll try.”

  
*

The flight to Wakanda is endless; Nate screams half the way, his little red face screwed up in the sort of fury only a near-toddler can manage. The quinjet flies itself, and Clint paces the length of it, rocking Nate in his arms, but Nate doesn’t want him, he doesn’t want Lila, he doesn’t want food or a nappy change or a storybook, he wants _Mommy._

 _“_ Nate, please,” Clint’s close to hysteria himself. Lila perches backwards in co-pilot’s seat watching him, her face pale and quiet and sad. “Nate, sweetheart, shush, I know, I know you want Mommy, but Mommy isn’t here, so you’ve got me and Lila, and that’s it.”

“No, no, Dadada _, Momma,_ ” Nate kicks against Clint’s chest, wriggling away. Eventually, he throws up all over the front of Clint’s t-shirt, and then subsides against his shoulder, whining miserably.

“Eww,” Lila says, a half-hearted attempt at her old self.

“Just wait until you have a baby,” Clint tells her, finding the baby wipes in one of the bags and cleaning Nate’s mouth. “You get used to sick pretty fast.”

“When will we be there?”

“You have a look at the clock on the autopilot and tell me.”

“Five hours! That’s _ages_.”

“Well, you know where Wakanda is? Right in the centre of Africa. It’s a long way away from Iowa.”

She’s young enough to still be excited at the prospect of an adventure, and she leans forward, looking out at the topography of the clouds, sunlight pooling luminescent in the dips and gleaming off the peaks. Clint wishes the world still held that sort of magic for him too, nothing gets rid of magic like hard times, and god knows he can’t remember the last time he’d closed his eyes and let himself dream, of paradise and uncomplicated futures and a quiet life well-lived. Life is explosions and tactics and loosing arrows, life is monsters and aliens and falling into the cracks between what is right and what needs to be done. Life is a labyrinth, not a tapestry; you never know what lurks in wait around the corner.

Nate is crying again, silently this time, his chubby arms wrapped around Clint’s neck, and Clint sighs, begins to pace, and tries to clear his mind. Of course, it never works.

*

The Wakanda he’d left had been noisy and bright and hot, life bursting at the seams all around him; the capital city he steps into off the ramp into is silent, as though there is a great weight pressing down from the sky. Natasha is standing at the bottom of the ramp - her hair is blonde, he thinks, he hasn’t seen it blonde since Rio. It is a kind of terrifying comfort; when Natasha dyes her hair blonde, she means revenge. There’s a new scar on her cheek.

Lila pelts off the jet from behind him, flinging herself at Nat, who catches her up easily into an embrace. “Hey,” she says, around Lila’s hair, just as Clint reaches them, holding out her free hand. He takes it. “Hey Clint.”

It takes an endless kind of strength not to collapse at the gentleness in her voice. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, willing himself not to cry again. Nate presses closer against his shoulder.

“Come on.” Natasha starts to walk, towing him inexorably along beside her. “How was the journey?”

“Long. Sorry Nat, I’m just…”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Clint. I know. Shuri’s expecting us in the throne room, and then you can have the evening to settle the kids in at our apartment.”

“Throne room?” Lila emerges from Nat’s shoulder.

“We’re staying at the Royal Palace of Wakanda,” Natasha tells her. “Princess Shuri is acting as Black Panther for the moment, and all foreigners must meet the Black Panther before being allowed to roam through the country.”

“What’s the Black Panther?”

“That’s the name for Wakanda’s ruler. Like a king or queen.”

“Oh,” Lila says, putting her thumb into her mouth like she’s four again. Clint’s heart twists; she only ever does that when she’s scared. “Is she nice?”

“She can be. She’s very clever,” Natasha says.

“Only met her once, but I reckon she could give Tony a run for his money.”

“I reckon she could beat Tony,” Natasha counters. “You didn’t see her in the last few days. She’s absolutely extraordinary.”

“Let’s hope she can extraordinary a way out of this mess,” Clint says, hoisting Nate higher against his shoulder.

*

He remembers the throne room from the last time he was here seeking sanctuary, standing silent and half-eroded and bitter behind Steve. The gold columns slice upwards into the air, the script on them glowing white down at the people gathered in front of the thrones. Princess Shuri is seated on the arm of the one in the centre. He’d seen her briefly last time, flitting through a corridor next to her brother, talking rapid-fire, her hands dancing through the air; now, the sparks have fizzled out and she looks nothing but exhausted, worn-down, her eyes raw and screaming her grief.

Natasha marches down the stairs - he wonders when she’d stopped sashaying and slithering and sliding, here one moment and gone the next - depositing Lila gently on her feet at the bottom and taking her hand. Clint follows them, praying Nate isn’t going to wake up and make a scene.

“Princess,” Natasha says, and Shuri’s eyes track upwards.

“Black Widow. This is your friend?”

“Clint Barton,” Natasha answers for him. “And his surviving children, Lila and Nathaniel.”

Surviving, he thinks, numbly. Surviving.

“You’re the marksman?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You can get settled in, and then report to General Okoye. She’s co-ordinating the forces.” Then, a moment later, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry for yours.”

She looks away, out of the great glass windows to her left; he sees her pull her atoms and cells closer, curling into herself infinitesimally. He recognises the dismissal, is about to move when:

“You’re a princess?” Lila asks, suddenly. Shuri looks back.

“Yes.”

“Lila!” Clint hisses.

“You’re very pretty, but your castle doesn’t look like one in my storybooks.”

Shuri blinks, and then manages a smile, but it’s all brittleness and edges you could cut yourself on if you weren’t being careful. “Thank you,” she says, with the grace of someone raised royal. “It’s much older than the ones in your storybooks, I would think. How about you go with your father now, and have a rest after your journey?”

“I’m so sorry,” Clint says, reaching out for Lila’s free hand. “Come on, Lila.”

Between them, they manage to get Lila out of the throne room, the heavy doors reverberating shut behind them; the second they’re in the corridor, in front of the silent, imposing pair of Dora Milaje standing guard, Lila’s face screws up and she starts to cry.

“Come on,” Natasha closes her fingers around Lila’s wrist. “Let’s get you to bed.”

*

Later, he finds himself up on the roof, a bottle of something in his hand, watching the stars glide silently across the sky. The city lights nestle down beneath his feet, and the warm wind whisks across his face, laden with smells he can’t put a name to. Natasha is a warm weight at his side, her head tucked into the join between his shoulder and his neck. He’d been loathe to leave the kids on their own, but Natasha had found someone to watch them, and now he’s here, high up on top of the world, he’s finally let himself come undone. He’s pleased Natasha dragged him out, reminds himself that she’s always known what he needs better than he does. She hasn’t mentioned the tears streaking down his cheeks, and he’d glad. He’s not sure he could take talking about it; the way Laura and Cooper had crumbled into nothing, sliding through his hands. They’d been his constants, his stars, holding him steady; without them, he’s in the wind, lost with no way home.

There’s a noise behind them, but he doesn’t look around until Natasha says, “Hey, Steve.”

Footsteps. “Hey Nat. Clint, thought you were still in Iowa.”

“Yeah,” Clint says, and Steve sits down on his other side, curling his feet over the edge. “Yeah, I was.”

“Everything…”

“Laura and Cooper,” Natasha says, saving Clint the pain of having to say their names again, to explain all over again what happened. He hears Steve’s huff of pained breath.

“Fucking Thanos.”

“I’m gonna help. If there’s a way to get them back, I want to be here, not in Iowa just sitting and waiting for something to happen.”

“Glad to have you back on the team,” Steve tells him, honest and open the way Steve Rogers always is, despite everything they’ve been through, despite the fact that the world has just been rent in half and nothing will ever be the same. “Could do with some old friends around.”

“Natasha told me about Bucky and Sam. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry about Laura and Cooper. I’m sorry we couldn’t destroy the Mind Stone in time, and that Tony is currently somewhere in the galaxy if not dead, and that Shuri is having to be Queen of Wakanda when she’s seventeen years old and has just lost her mother and brother…”

“Steve,” Natasha says, in the tone of voice that means stop-blaming-yourself-for-things-that-aren’t-your-fault.

“I know, I know. I just…” Steve scrubs the palm of his hand over his face.

Clint reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder, and they all lapse into silence, listening to the city noises swelling in the night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is gaining an unexpected plot. Oh well - it shouldn't be any more than four chapters, but is providing a lot of procrastination for my exams! I hope I've written people okay, I'm kind of running on not a lot of sleep and a bit too much hangover, but I'm so done with it, so if there are any errors I'll sort them out tomorrow <3 <3

**II**

When Clint gets back to the apartment six days later, sweaty and scratched and full of aching, dragging tiredness from sparring with some of the Dora Milaje -

_“you had better stick to your bow and arrow, old man,” Siyange had said, letting him up from where she’d had him pinned._

_“think you’ve made a pretty convincing case for it,” Clint had replied, heaving himself to his feet with a groan. “Retirement’s made me soft.”_

\- he’s greeted by the sight of Pepper Potts sitting on the sofa with Natasha, holding Nate carefully in her arms and looking as though one wrong move will send her plummeting off the edge of the cliff.

“Hey,” he says, and they both look around, Natasha giving him the kind of soft smile she reserves for private moments, the kind where the years fall away from around her shoulders and they could be nineteen and thirty-two again and just learning to trust each other. 

“Hello, Clint,” Pepper shifts, and Nate holds out his arms.

“Dadada!”

“Hey, sweetheart,” Clint scoops him up, inhaling baby smell and relishing the way Nate presses his face into the side of Clint’s neck, soft and small and making quiet cooing noises, his fat little hands clutching into Clint’s sweaty t-shirt. “Have you been good for Auntie Nat?”

“He’s been quieter today,” Natasha says. “Must be all that crying overnight, tired him out.”

Clint nods, focusing on the feeling of Nate’s heartbeat thrumming lightly against his own.

“How was sparring?”

“Good to get some energy out,” Clint tells her. “You were right, as usual. Siyange reminds me of you.”

“We have a competition going,” Natasha nods to herself. “Relatively even at the moment.”

“Bet that’s a sight. How are you holding up, Pepper? Didn’t realise you’d come.”

“It’s only a flying visit,” Pepper says. Her lines of her face are drawn tight, close to breaking. She twists her wedding ring around her finger. “I can’t afford to be away from the company for longer than a day. We’ve lost so many people. I just needed to see a familiar face.”

“I can imagine.” Clint perches on the edge of one of the armchairs across from them, thinking about the news reports Natasha keeps shoving his way, the briefings from  her spiderweb of contacts and informants, the states of emergency and riots and terrible, awful violence suddenly cutting swathes across the planet. He’s grateful for anything that distracts him; it’s a blessing, to wake from nightmares and have something to do other than think about how they’re gone and he’s failed and how he always fails, first with Loki and now with Thanos, and why did he ever think he could keep them safe?

“Is Lila back yet?” he asks after a moment, thinking with a flinch of the way she crawls into bed with him every night, crying herself to sleep only to wake shaking and white and chilly to the touch. When Nate screams and won’t sleep, Natasha will come in and sit on the end of the bed as he paces the floor, holding Lila close and whispering in Russian into her ears, stroking her hair, uncomplaining despite the deep circles under her eyes.

“No, but Steve said they’d be back by dinner.”

“She’s really taken a shine to Steve, hasn’t she?” Clint says. “I’ll have to tell him that he doesn’t have to cart her around everywhere he goes.”  
“He probably likes the distraction,” Pepper points out. “You what Steve is like with kids.”

“That damn Smithsonian exhibit,” Natasha says, and then she’s smiling, and Clint’s thinking of the days she’d call from DC and he’d lie out on the lawn under the dripping sunlight with Loki still lurking in the back of his head and the kids running screaming through the long, whispering grass in the fields, listening to Natasha talk and talk about the world he’d taken a breather from, about Steve, and Strike Team: Alpha, and everything else that flitted across her brain. He misses those days - not so much the recovery from being mind-controlled, but the ease of them, the belief that he and Natasha were the best of the best, and that they’d always come home, and he’d walk through the door into Laura’s arms, buzzing and exhausted and sometimes angry or sad, and she’d hold him close and everything would click back into place.

There’s quiet for a moment, and then a knock at the door. “Come in!” Clint calls, and then it opens, and suddenly Pepper’s in motion, flinging herself off the couch in an ungraceful tangle of arms and legs and pale ginger hair and straight into the figure silhouetted there, a figure who stumbles back as she plummets into his arms.

“Don’t pull that face, Barton. I know you missed me.” Tony Stark says.

“Never. Leave Me. Again.” Pepper growls.

*

They convene back in the throne room, Shuri sitting in her throne this time and tapping her fingers against the arm-rest, irritation stalking back and forth across her face. Tony is showered and in clean clothes, and he and Steve are currently eyeing each other cautiously.

“Oh for Bast’s sake, hug it out,” Shuri snaps. “We’ve got work to do.”

*

Time jolts forward after that, ricocheting between bursts of activity and speed, and endless stretches of sparring and holding his daughter through her nightmares and practicing down on the range, feeling the pull of his muscles over and over - string-draw-release - and the thud of the arrow into the target. When Lila isn’t off with Steve, roaming the countryside, she sits and reads books taken from the Palace’s library, her small finger moving over the words, sounding out any she doesn’t know:

“Daddy, what does ca…ca-ta-stro-pic mean?” she asks one day.

“Catastrophic,” Clint corrects, pulling another arrow from his quiver. Shuri’s labs are developing new tech for him, arrows that collect kinetic energy as they fly, exploding into luminescent blue fire as they hit their target. “Something really horrible.”

[Another day, she leans on the barrier next to him, and says, “Daddy, I want to be Steve when I grow up.”

Clint feels her words like pangs, low in his stomach. “Why?” he asks, cautiously.

“Because then I can get Mommy back, like Steve got Bucky,” she tells him, oh-so-serious, her eyebrows folding together.

“It’s not much fun being a hero,” Clint finds the words after a moment, wondering when his little girl had decided this, when the idea had tip-toed into her brain like a sneak-thief in the night. “You have to give up a lot. You don’t get to be happy, a lot of the time.”

“I’m not happy _now,_ ” Lila sticks out her bottom lip. Her eyes shine. Clint sticks his bow down and kneels in front of her, putting a hand on the top of her arm.

“You know we’re working to find Mommy, right?”

“Ye-es. Everyone says that, but all you do is shoot and practise fighting and look after Nate, and all Steve does is run around the country, and Auntie Nat isn’t here, and no-one is looking for her!”

“Oh darling,” Clint says. “It won’t happen right now. We’ve got to be patient, to wait - you know I’ve always said if you rush into something it won’t turn out right, will it?”

Lila nods.

“Well, it’s very important we take our time with this, otherwise it might go wrong and we won’t get another chance.”

“Okay. I still want to be Steve when I grow up. Or you. Or Auntie Nat.”

“Well how about you give it ten years, then you can decide when you’re a bit older, hey?”

Lila stares at him for a second, and then flings her arms around his neck momentarily, before drawing back. “Only if you teach me to shoot,” she says, and he bites back a pained laugh, thinking of how he and Laura had had bets on which of their kids would take after him. She’d always thought Nate, since Lila and Coop had never shown that much interest in archery, but he’s not surprised it’s Lila, his little Lila with her new-found quietness and the kind of fire only an eight-year-old can muster sparking in her eyes.

“I think we’ve got ourselves a deal,” he tells her. “How about we go see if they have any kid-sized bows in that armory of theirs, eh?”]

A week passes, and then a month, and then Natasha is walking back down the steps into the throne room, side by side with a woman who walks with the sky on her shoulders, bowed and strong. Clint’s there for that encounter, silent, and watching as Shuri screams, “Nakia!” and leaps into her arms, showing every single one of her seventeen years of age. They hold each other for a long time, talking away in Wakandan, and then Nakia takes a step back and looks at the others - Clint in the window, and Steve, hovering by the door with Thor, and says, “We’ve found him.”

*

“We need to go,” Thor says, immediately, muscles coiled and tense, and Clint feels it too, the urge to move, to go, to get it over, but Shuri holds up her hand, and, surprisingly, Thor quiets. Royalty, Clint thinks: Thor’s a king, but Shuri’s every bit a queen, and here, she holds all of the power in the curve of her fingers.

“We will wait for General Okoye, and for the rest of your team, and Nakia will finish making her report. It doesn’t sound like he’s going anywhere,” Shuri orders, regal. She’s still clinging to Nakia’s hand, Clint notes, as though the other woman is going to dissolve into mist, just like everyone else, as though Shuri’s will is the only thing keeping her atoms together.

Tony and Bruce arrive together, and after a moment, Okoye does too, greeting Nakia with a fierce, restrained kind of joy and standing on the other side of the throne, folding her arms.

“He’s not far,” Nakia starts out. “I found him in the rain-forest, but it’s not actually him - as far as I can tell, it’s just his body. He’s still breathing…”

“Fucking shame,” Tony mutters.

“But it appears as though his consciousness no longer lives there. I brought the gauntlet back with me, as there was nothing stopping us taking it, and it’s under guard in the lab, waiting for you, my Queen.”

“What did you do with him?” Steve asks.

“Under guard, where he lies. I didn’t want to bring him back into the country.” The curl of Nakia’s lip is feral, and Clint thinks, not for the first time since the two of them walked into the room, how much she reminds him of Natasha.

“He’s dead the second we decide,” Natasha adds, folding her arms. “Democratic decision-making, and everything the Avengers are supposed to stand for.”

“Does he even deserve to be dead?” Tony asks. “Is anyone else here forgetting that he wiped out _half the life in the universe_ because it feels a lot like we are.”

“Better to wipe out the threat than to gain vengeance,” Steve replies, quietly. “And work out a way to reverse-engineer what he did. That’s my suggestion.”

“My Queen, I agree with the Captain,” General Okoye says. “I can oversee it myself, if you wish.”

“Seriously, you’re just going to let a genocide…”

Natasha puts a hand over Tony’s mouth, and Clint closes his eyes for a moment, and thinks about the changes in Tony, the way he holds himself, the way his eyes burn, the deaths he carries on his back, black and hunched and rasping. He thinks about what he’d do, with the chance to avenge Laura’s death, Coop’s death, and then about the world and the greater good, and makes his decision.

“We can debate ethics later,” Nakia says, firmly. “We have a more pressing problem. I cannot stay, the world is falling apart at the seams, and they need aid, they need reassurance.”

“Are you sure you will…” Shuri starts.

“You do your science, sister. I will be fine; Natasha and I will leave this evening. We can leave the problem of Thanos’ body to Okoye, the elders, and the Avengers, if she is willing.”

“I am.”

Shuri mutters something under her breath; Clint just about catches, “This is why you should have been queen, Nakia.” She raises her head, and then says, “Come on then, white boys. We’ve got science to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come flail with me on Tumblr: @barefoot-anarchist.

**Author's Note:**

> To be continued. I just got Tumblr - come squeal/cry with me at @barefoot-anarchist.


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